Macrolanguages, countries & orthographies

[Doug Ewell]

CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:

> Hi, I think we can tag moyen francais as French and Middle English as 
> English.
> I am not sure we can tag Old English as English (why is it not 
> Danish?).

This is *exactly* what I have been talking about with regard to usurping 
the role of the ISO RAs.  What gives us the right to say that Middle 
English is the same as English, but Old English is not?  How does this 
aid interoperability and accurate identification of content?  How does 
our application of ISO 639 differ from anyone else's in this regard?

This is becoming very worrisome to me.  I can now easily imagine someone 
trying to register a primary language subtag without going through ISO 
639 first, or with their rejection slip in hand, with the attitude that 
the RA's opinion doesn't matter or that we know better somehow.  This is 
not what we are here for.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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